Abstract
The coupled ocean and atmosphere of the tropics plays an important role in climatic variability over the time scales relevant to the past two millennia. Small changes in the tropics can resonate through the climate system through their influence on regional ocean-atmosphere systems and boundary conditions. Increasingly, records from long-lived corals are being developed and applied to understand the pre-instrumental variability of the tropical oceans. Short records from many sites have demonstrated the utility of many geochemical and growth-related tracers in monitoring diverse aspects of past environmental changes. Longer records, particularly from the Pacific, are beginning to provide new information on the nature of intrinsic ocean-atmosphere variability. New results presented here support the application of these techniques in other regions. In particular, oxygen isotopic records from Venezuela clearly monitor regional SST patterns in the tropical Atlantic. On the northern Great Barrier Reef, new data indicate that seasonally specific reconstructions of rainfall and SST can be derived from coral isotopic records. These new data join a growing body of literature supporting the development of a network of coral paleoceanographic sites that will lend fresh insight into the natural variability and sensitivity of the tropical ocean-atmosphere and its role in global climate change.
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Cole, J. (1996). Coral records of climate change: understanding past variability in the tropical ocean-atmosphere. In: Jones, P.D., Bradley, R.S., Jouzel, J. (eds) Climatic Variations and Forcing Mechanisms of the Last 2000 Years. NATO ASI Series, vol 41. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-61113-1_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-61113-1_16
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